Specifically, Parakilas said he warned back in 2012 that
Facebook's developer platform posed a major security risk,
because the company had few measures to see what app makers were
doing with people's information.

Academic Aleksandr Kogan built a Facebook app that siphoned off 87 million user profiles to Cambridge Analytica.

source

CBS

Now Parakilas is waging a global battle against Facebook, a
company currently worth $557 billion (£417 billion), to ensure
the firm can't jeopardise future elections and put people's
personal data at risk.

Parakilas has played a major role in US congressional hearings
about the scandal, has testified to British politicians, and is
about to fly to Brussels to explain the scandal in more technical
detail to European lawmakers.

"I've heard from some people inside Facebook, they appreciate
what I'm doing," Parakilas told Business Insider in a phone
interview. "I'm pretty sure Mark [Zuckerberg] and Sheryl
[Sandberg] do not appreciate what I'm doing. I have no intention
of stopping until the company is doing all it needs to do to
protect our elections."

One politician, Molly Scott Cato, said of Zuckerberg: "He's
totally out of his depth - he talks about setting Facebook up in
college with this homey story and I'm, like, 'Christ, this guy
has the fate of European democracy in his hands and he doesn't
know what to do.'"

Parakilas added that he's not exactly delighting in bringing
Facebook down a notch.

"No one's pleased," he said. "This is a disaster. I am personally
aghast, and it would have been better if they had fixed this
issue six years ago, but they didn't."

"What's the chance that only one app developer did something bad
with all that data?" said Parakilas. "The culture, in general, was one, when I was
there, that did not encourage deep auditing of what third parties
were doing."

Although Parakilas himself only worked directly with Zuckerberg
"a little bit," he said the CEO was extremely hands on. He thinks
this is why no one has yet been fired at Facebook over Cambridge
Analytica.

"Sheryl Sandberg [has]
said Mark takes responsibility because he designed the
platform," Parakilas said. "That's true, Mark was very hands-on.
Arguably, if Mark was going to fire someone for making the
biggest strategic mistake here, it would be himself."

Mark Zuckerberg is both chairman and CEO of Facebook and, thanks
to his voting rights, essentially has total control over the
company.

"The issue here is a structural one, the structure is set from
the absolute top, by Mark and Sheryl," Parakilas added. "There's
no independent board. Firing some mid-level manager doesn't solve
the problem."

EU regulators have "little to lose" in going after Facebook

caption

British MEP Claude Moraes is chair of the LIBE committee, where Parakilas will appear on Monday.

source

Getty

Parakilas will repeat his
warnings about Facebook when he appears before European lawmakers
on Monday.

But, he added, he also wants to
talk about the EU's new privacy law, the General Data Protection
Regulation, which kicked in on May 25 and is having major
repercussions for tech and ad companies.

"I think GDPR is a great first
step," he said. "I think if we really want to ensure that users
are protected moving forward, we have to find ways to encourage
new businesses that are aligned with the interests of users.
Regulation can be a tool to encourage entrepreneurship."

He added: "People in the US are more constrained about going
after a big, popular, valuable US company than people in Europe
and the UK. [The latter] have little to lose by going after
Facebook... There's also the fact that in the US we have this
long tradition of not regulating privacy on the internet at all.